Visiting the Vermonts Humanities Council

Joan Black and Toni Eubanks

On Wednesday Toni Eubanks and Sylvia Manning returned materials to the Vermont Humanities Council in Montpelier.  Joan Black, Administrative Assistant, gave them a tour.  They met the Director, Peter Gilbert,
and told him how the NEK Wednesday Poets had begun through the gift of copies of Billy Collins' Poetry 180 and was still going strong.

Toni Eubanks, Barton librarian, in front of the Vermont Humanities Council, Montpelier.

Andy's birthday

Andy Bondor, 57, of Barton, painter and poetry maker.

Last week we celebrated Andy Bondor's birthday.   His wife, Patty, brought a candle shaped as 57, but he's already taken it off to cut the cake for everyone to have a piece.

In class we wrote sonnets, though Adrien was reluctant to use the word.  Instead, we wrote 3 quatrains with abab rhyme scheme ending with a rhyming couplet.  Regular meter, no more than 10 syllables.

  

Leland's Legacy, by Adrien Helm

Leland’s Legacy

Lean, jeans-clad, plaid shirted

On a ladder silhouetted dark

Against a greying sky,

Leather gloved hand reaching through

A rung to reach the chimney,

Pointing up the mortar

Against the coming winter.

So you, word by word,

Bricks down the page,

Built this image for us

Gathered by candlelight

In the Library basement,

Hanging on your words

In the air, as surely

As you hung from that ladder

Doing the necessary next thing.

Your voice’s native lilt

Grounded in these

Firred and mapled slopes

Settled us. We saw through

Eyes of seven Vermont

Generations the virtues

Of place, of patience,

Of the inevitability of beauty.

You prepared us for winter.

On a crystalline blue

September day you

Climbed beyond our seeing,

Leaving the ladder of your poetry

Leaning against the solid

Reality of home.

--
Adrien


[Adrien makes reference to the time when Leland Kinsey read his poems to the Wednesday Poets.]

And now we've lost David Budbill

In his poem, Dilemma, in Moment to Moment that I find on our Vermont authors' shelf in the belovèd Barton Public Library, there's this first of two verses:

 

                                                                           

I want to be

            famous

so I can be

           humble

abut being

           famous.

 

Famous he is.  Jim Lowe writes in the Times Argus that he was second only to Robert Frost for being well-known in Vermont.  Here's the link to that article:

 

 http://www.timesargus.com/article/20160926/NEWS01/160929697/0/RSS14

 

Saddened by the loss of Barton's Leland Kinsey

Leland Kinsey, 1950-2016

It was with genuine sadness that MaryLiz called me this morning to tell me of Leland Kinsey's death from lymphoma on Wednesday. I'm sure you share with me profound grief that his authentic voice of the Northeast Kingdom has been stilled. I cherish the moments he shared with us two summers ago.

​Adrien​

"Once called the unofficial poet-laureate of the Northeast Kingdom, poet Leland Kinsey has died at the age of 66.
Kinsey was born in Barton. He was a seventh-generation Vermonter and farmer whose poetry was shaped by his life farming in the Kingdom and by the people around him.
Friends describe Kinsey as a masterful poet, a gifted teacher and an avid fisherman, not to mention a farmer, a printer and naturalist.
He spent most of his life working the rocky soil that his family farmed for generations. His dedication to that hard work, along with his love of that unique northern geography, come through in his poetry."

[VPR:  http://digital.vpr.net/post/northeast-kingdom-poet-leland-kinsey-dies-66]